So, Australia had an election on the weekend. Not only did the conservatives get in - which means no marriage equality, no proper telecommunications infrastructure upgrade, more refugee abuse and the cancelling of emissions trading in exchange for planting some trees - but this lot of weirdos have got into the senate...

“In the past, the deer didn’t go to the Czech side because of the fence,” German biologist Marco Heurich told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “Now the fence is gone but they still stop at the border.” Film producer Tom Synnatzschke added, “The wall in the head is still there.”

A vast steel sculpt, 8 by 8 by 8m, being lowered deep into the Pacific Ocean. This first of a series of sculpts will be stored into the Marianas trench, right to the bottom 11,000 metres down. With us so far? That’s 200 miles off Guam Island between Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Now, are you ready for the plot twist? It’s going to be full of human blood and hair samples, DNA.

The Uzbek-speaking source, speaking from Russia, confirms that the victim was targeted because he is gay.

"We made him sit on a bottle so that he repents for his sins and comes to reason," he told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service. "We did this to protect the dignity of Uzbeks. We live and work here, we are in contact with people of different nationalities. There will be no respect for us otherwise."

According to the purported assailant, the attack took place on September 11 in Novosibirsk, where he himself is a student, and all the participants were ethnic Uzbeks.

He says the man was first detained by a group of Russian antigay vigilantes who lured him to a fake date through a social-networking website.

The vigilantes then allegedly handed him to the city's Uzbek community.

"Russian guys caught him and called us to say they had a gay Uzbek," the self-proclaimed author of the video said. "We then questioned him and he confessed to everything. There were six or seven of us. The Russians told us he was a pedophile, which he denied. But he confessed that he was gay."

Starting two weeks ago, requests faxed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) started coming back as undeliverable. After several subsequent attempts and troubleshooting on our end, MuckRock reached out to the OSD. Sure enough, their fax machine is down... possibly until November.

Now, in 2013, you wouldn't think this would be an issue. But when an agency accepts FOIA requests by a) fax, b) mail or c) a clunky online request portal that doesn't play nice with other systems, suddenly that fax machine becomes a technical linchpin.

It bears repeating: The office that oversees the most powerful military in history (not to mention the best-funded) is unable to project when its single fax machine will once again be operational.

The OSD's FOIA section chief confirmed the grim news yesterday, responding that his office "will likely need to procure (purchase) a new fax machine. However, that purchase will not occur until the start of the new fiscal year (at the earliest)."

A secret unit operating under the direction of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge carried out systemic torture of suspects in criminal cases, mainly African-Americans on Chicago's South Side, to produce false confessions between 1972 and 1991.

While the abuse has been widely documented, Mr. Burge was never criminally prosecuted, despite ongoing accounts of almost 200 men sent to prison based on forced confessions on his watch. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations has run out, preventing Burge from ever facing a criminal trial. He is currently serving a 4-1/2-year prison term for perjury and obstruction of justice charges from a 2010 civil case related to the torture cases.

@Cat - Any chance you could post notes after your talk? The topic of modern bogies is one I'm very much into (i.e., we're no longer scared of things like drowning on a scale to warrant telling tales of Jenny Greenteeth and Peg Powler but now kids create things like the Rake and Slenderman, what fears do those embody?).